


people don't actually run away and join the circus

by alatarmaia4



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: (talieisn has already jossed some of this but i don't care), Gen, anyway i watched ep 1 and desperately needed more about molly and yasha so i made it myself, nobody dies but there's some stuff in there, read the warnings in the beginning notes pls, some unnecessary uses of poison
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-19
Updated: 2018-01-19
Packaged: 2019-03-06 17:55:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13416534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alatarmaia4/pseuds/alatarmaia4
Summary: Molly, and how he came to meet Yasha and the rest.





	people don't actually run away and join the circus

**Author's Note:**

> so i made a thing! molly is my favorite character and every word out of taliesin's mouth makes me love him more.
> 
> re: the tags: molly's bloodhunter class has a description which says "at first level, you have survived imbibing the Hunter's Bane, a poisonous alchemical concoction which alters your life's blood, forever binding you to the darkness and honing your senses against it". Because of this, it's included in the story, so there *is* a scene where Molly willingly drinks poison. without intent to die, but i thought i'd warn about it anyway!

Contrary to what most people believed, Mollymauk really was his given name.

If he’d made one up for himself, it would have been something much grander, for when he joined the carnival. Theodorus the Grand, or The Incredible Ignis. But his mother was a sailor, and so when he’d been born in the little house on the Menagerie coast, he’d been named Mollymauk. 

It was her favorite bird, so she said, but Molly had never seen the appeal. Maybe if he’d ever actually seen one of the things, it would make more sense, but he doubted it. Birds were birds - they filled a niche in whatever ecosystem they inhabited, and sometimes they were his dinner.

Molly liked to tell people his parents were dead. It made them feel sorry for him, which meant he could wrangle that pity into one more flyer handed out, one more potential audience member willing to pay the five copper entrance fee because they “knew who it was going to”. In truth, his parents were probably still alive. They were perfectly nice people too, who’d done their best when their son had come out purple, horned, and already using his tail to try and catch people by the ankles.

Molly had never asked what his father had done to bring enough of a demonic influence into the family (literally). He preferred the stories he came up with. In some of them, the ones he’d made up when he was younger and impressionable, his father had been tricked into staying in the Nine Hells, and his mother had to go and rescue his father even though she was pregnant with Molly, and something or other had happened in the process. When he got older, the story changed to something evil brought upon their house (the figurative one, not the wooden one his father had built) by whichever parent he was madder at in that moment. 

He learned as he got older that a curse on a bloodline probably wasn’t enough to make someone a tiefling, unless it originated from someone very powerful, which given that both his parents were still alive seemed unlikely. In his moodier years he wondered if his father was really his father at all - something he said to his parents’ faces precisely once in the heat of anger, and then seeing their sorrow and anger resolved to keep it in his head. He did not, however, stop wondering.

Books were his way of narrowing down the possible cause. Knowledge in general, really, but books were the most readily available source of that. Molly tore through tomes on the Nine Hells, on the Abyss, dictionaries of Infernal, fairy stories about people who faced down Asmodeus himself to retrieve the soul of their true love (etc, etc). Incidentally, this meant he absorbed a great deal of other information; the kind of things that were generally grouped in with Infernal subjects, which was to say, subjects like necromancy and blood magic and historical records of witch burnings in rural, Arcanum-era settlements. 

Molly remembered, once, overhearing his parents talk worriedly about what he was reading. They’d never tried to stop him, but neither did they like it or aid him in finding any of his books, and they made rules like “no reading at the table” and “no, you cannot bring that to school with you for when you finish your work early”. Molly thought that if they wanted him to do anything but hole up in his room to read the rest of the time, they probably should have thought those rules through better. 

In any case, he overheard the conversation, and the worried tone it took place in. He spent all night thinking, and woke up the next morning slumped over his ramshackle desk with a crick in his neck for his efforts.

The next thing he did, after that, was put his favorite book into a backpack, put some clothes on top of that, then go downstairs and tell his mother he wanted to visit the Empire.

And that was that.

He left with a much larger backpack, and an extra bag. His father gave him the bow and quiver Molly had used before to hunt with him (Molly did not comment on his own skill, or lack thereof, in archery). He endured two goodbye kisses, and promised to be back in two weeks.

Hitchhiking was more trouble than books had made it seem. Nevertheless, Molly caught a ride up to the Dreemoth Ravine, and across to the other side. He hunted on the way, and while crossing the Ravine and into the empire traded his bow and quiver for a scimitar which he had to spend an entire day cleaning and sharpening before it would cut anything. At the end of the first week, he dropped the extra bag in a river and had to chase it downstream, only to come back to find the food he’d left in his camp stolen, and the only spare clothes he owned also soaked by rain. 

By the end of the second week, he’d gotten better at hunting with the scimitar, and managed to get all the bloodstains out of the clothes he’d been wearing when he first tried. He was still on the fringes of the Dwendalian Empire, but making his way west as the weeks passed him by. Sometimes roads steered him too far south and he found himself in strange villages where they did things differently than in the Empire, or (memorably, once) a city where a castle rose above the village, and four towers rose even further above it, missing the Dwenalian onion domes and decorated with a mess of twisting, beautiful carvings. Molly spent an entire day going around the outer wall, finding shapes in the art - there was a lion, there an owl, and next to that a deer sitting next to a peacock displaying its tail. 

He was interrupted when the guards got tired of him loitering and kicked him out, but he spent the whole journey back north fixing the images in his head. He even borrowed some ink in the next town, and used the blank backpages of his favorite book to carefully copy down the ones he remembered best. The lion - the owl - the deer - and the peacock, with a disappointing jagged line through its tail where the innkeeper had impatiently yanked his pen back. 

Molly was not a popular figure in the Empire, no matter where he went. Wanderers often were not, even when they  _ weren’t  _ purple and horned and smartasses. 

Especially not when they were being sarcastic after getting caught stealing food.

“You think you’re the only one in the world who needs to eat?” The half-orc demanded. Molly only wheezed in response, because the big lady who’d knocked him flat to the ground was still pinning him down. His scimitar was lying on the wet grass, too far away to reach even if he could move his arms. “Huh? Arrogant little shit! I paid for that food myself, and if you think I don’t need every bit of it to keep what I’ve got running, you’ve got another thing coming!”

Molly wondered if they were going to let him up anytime soon so he could breathe. 

They did - but only so they could tie his wrists and ankles together and throw him in the back of one of their wagons. The pale lady climbed up to sit next to him, and never took her eyes off him.

“You could just let me go,” Molly offered. He was still cold and wet from the rain that morning. His hair was soaked flat and getting in his eyes (he needed a haircut), and he wished he could reach up and push it back. The way he’d been tied up, he was forced to sit with his knees up by his head, knocking against the bottom curl of his horns. His bag hung heavily off his shoulders, not quite large enough to rest against the bottom of the wagon. At least, Molly thought sarcastically, he’d been spared having to deal with carrying around his other bag, because it had been stolen two months ago. 

“I don’t think so.” The lady was looking over his scimitar, giving a couple test slashes to the air. The jolt of the wagons starting off didn’t make her waver in the slightest. She put it back in its sheath once she was done, and tossed that further into the depths of the wagon. Molly watched it clatter to the floor next to a barrel.

“Where are you taking me?”

“Whatever city’s next that has guards that can arrest you,” the lady said. 

“What if I escape first?”

“If you escape those ropes and try to run away, you won’t have your sword,” the lady said. “Also, I’ll stab you if you try.”

“It’s a scimitar,” Molly said, and tried to bend his head down to push his hair out of his eyes so he didn’t have to look at her and see her watching him with those creepy eyes. 

The wagon rumbled down the dirt road, only stopping once or twice to give the horses a rest and to pass out food and water for the day. Molly was allowed to have one hand untied for about five minutes so he could scarf down the half loaf of bread the pale lady handed him, and gulp down a cup of metallic-tasting water. 

“Look,” he told the lady as she was tying him back down, “I really don’t think this is necessary. I didn’t even get anything.”

“Ignore him, Yasha,” piped up the small dwarf girl who had discovered an inexplicable fascination with Molly and lingered around by the back of the cart during the whole break.

“If you don’t go sit back down where you belong we’ll leave and you’ll have to run next to the wagon until we get to town,” Yasha replied without looking up. The dwarf girl gasped, and bolted off. 

“You don’t even have to tell  _ me  _ anything threatening, I’ll run off if you let me,” Molly said.

“You’re not paying me.” Yasha finished tying a tight knot. “Bo wants you brought to justice or whatever. You caught him in a bad mood.”

“That’s not  _ my  _ fault.”

Yasha gave him a long look as she sat back down. Molly was jolted when the wagon started moving, but as usual, his captor wasn’t fazed.

“Tell you what,” she said. “If you can get out of those ropes, I’ll let you run. No promises I won’t give chase, but you can run for however far you can go.”

Molly grinned.

* * *

 

What Yasha did not know when she threw out the lifeline of a bargain to Molly was that, over the past six months or so (traveling went slowly when one was walking everywhere), Molly had been arrested before. Oh, it wasn’t often he ran out of coin for food and lodging, but not every place had convenient jobs open for one or two day town residents in need of some pocket money. So he’d stolen before, and he’d never been very good at it, and he was always terrible at talking his way out of it. So by process of elimination, he’d had to become very good at escaping.

The first thing Molly did was put his back to Yasha. He didn’t need her watching him, or specifically his hands as he picked apart her knots one-handed. Sharp nails came in handy times like this - bits of the rope actually fray as he scratched at it. 

The real problem was his scimitar. He definitely needed that, but he didn’t have a good way of getting to it, or getting out of the wagon once he had it. But he had time to think as he worked, and by the time the horizon was getting confused with the onset of both sunset and threatening rainclouds, Molly had an idea or two.

The wagon he’d been put in was in the front of the line, presumably so other people could keep an eye on him. Each wagon was drawn by a pair of horses. Molly still had the tin cup they give him water in. He kept his hand still like he was still tied up, judged his aim, and hit one of the horses square between the eyes with the cup. 

The horse, predictably, freaked the fuck out, which meant the wagon driver freaked out, and the people riding in the back started shouting questions as the wagon swerved and the other horse started panicking too. Yasha leaped off the back to grab the reins and pull the pair to a halt, dodging hooves, and by the time she thought to look back Molly had grabbed his scimitar and was leaping past a startled Bo in the driver’s seat of the first wagon.

Molly hit the ground running and vanished into the trees.

* * *

 

When Molly finally ran out of steam and collapsed to the ground, be barely had the energy to drag himself to his feet and try to cover his tracks. He slept first, in a tree to keep safe. Then he made camp in the forest and hunted for his food, beginning to get caught up in the exhilaration of having succeeded in escaping. The camp was messy and the food wasn’t great - his hand had trembled as he held it over the sputtering fire - but it hadn’t been handed to him by a guard and he could eat it while lying down stretched out on the ground. 

The enthusiasm faded over the next couple of days, as he slogged his way through the forest to try and find a town that his captors wouldn’t also be going to. By the time he arrived in a podunk town barely bigger than he was, the only thing keeping him going was the promise of an inn that would listen to the silver pieces that had been in the little pouch he’d snatched up on his way out of the wagon.

A bath and a mirror to look in while he cut his hair went a long way towards improving Molly’s attitude. For the first time in months - for the first time since he’d left home - he felt a little more like himself.

...The usual phrase would be “felt like a human being again”, but of course, that didn’t apply to him.

Molly adopted other skills as he continued his journey, found tricks other than theft with which to earn enough coin for the occasional night’s room and board. His bedroll developed a flattened impression of his body, wearing thinner and thinner until he was forced to trade it in for a new one that cost as much as a normal bed in an inn. His coat developed frayed stitching and ragged, mudstained hems which Molly labored extensively to repair. His shoes wore through twice and he bought just as shitty ones to replace them both times. A woman paid him with a deck of nonsense cards in exchange for a pretty flower he’d been trying to press between the pages of his book. 

Time passed. 

Molly was farther from the coast than he’d ever been, but the thought of the faraway sea rarely crossed his mind. Snow was falling again, and he was more pressed for somewhere to spend the Empire’s harsh winters. Camping outdoors would not do in a place where falling asleep without a guaranteed heat source could, and probably would, mean death.

He was sitting at a bar and nursing a drink, considering the prices the owner had named for a possibly months-long stay, when a shadow fell over him from behind.

“You look taller,” said Yasha from behind him.

Molly had spun around and half-drawn his sword before she finished speaking. He knew that voice  _ very  _ well. But Yasha was still fast, and the hand that wasn’t holding her drink closed around his wrist, preventing his scimitar from leaving its sheath.

“We’re in a public place,” she said. “Also, I’m off-duty, and don’t actually give a shit about you when I’m not being paid. Especially not months later. Guess I was right about there not being many purple tieflings in the world, though.”

Molly eyed her warily as she sat down at the bar next to him. Yasha still had those unsettling heterochromatic eyes, and she hadn’t lost her penchant for dark makeup and whatever was going on with the stripe down her chin. “What do you want, then?”

Yasha shrugged. “‘S’up with you? I got nobody better to talk to that I don’t live with.”

“Your carnival’s not here, is it?”

“Yeah. This is our winter circuit. Snows are easier to deal with down south.”

“Easier,” Molly said flatly. He’d gotten cold and wet up to his calves just trying to walk down the road to the inn. 

“Yeah.” Yasha’s eyes flicked downwards - towards his feat - and then back up to meet his gaze. The corner of her mouth twitched like she wanted to smile. “Easier.” She raised her tankard towards him, then drained the whole thing in one long pull.

Molly would have left - he  _ wanted  _ to leave and not have to deal with Yasha. But she’d tilted her head back and in the light of the tavern, the edges of her black makeup caught the light in a way that made Molly realize, abruptly, that it was not all makeup.

There were tiny black downy feathers at the corners of her eyes.

“You’re-” Molly began, and then stopped. Only fallen aasimar had black feathers, he was pretty sure. He couldn’t see if Yasha had feathers anywhere else, under the layers of fur over leathers over cloth. His sudden fascination kept him in his seat, and now he was the one staring. 

Yasha had put her drink down. She didn’t look like she wanted to smile anymore. Molly thought that she had probably guessed what he wasn’t saying.

“What?” Yasha demanded.

“Did it hurt when you fell from heaven?” Molly asked.

* * *

 

Nursing his bruised jaw and smarting pride (he hadn’t even gotten his sword out before Yasha was done with him), Molly still made his way down towards where the carnival had set up the next day. He planned on avoiding Yasha, but there might have been some kind of fortune-teller there, and he had a deck of cards that could probably be played off as tarot or something like that. If a carnival could do it, there was no reason he couldn’t as well.

A townsperson had given him directions to the fortune-teller’s spot, and he found here there just as he’d been told. An elderly woman, human, set up with a board across her lap covered in a deep blue scarf. She was draped in several scarfs herself, layered flashes of bright colors, some of which jangled as she moved. She looked up and squinted at Molly as he strode up to her. Molly doubted it was because the sunlight was too strong.

“Eager to have your fortune told, young man?” She asked, voice wavering. Molly idly wondered who made her work outside when it was cold and snowy, but didn’t care enough to entertain the thought longer. 

“In a way,” Molly said. “I was more interested in the hows of the business than in paying for the privilege of experiencing it. I was wondering if you might have any tips.”

The old lady’s eyes brightened. She must not have spoken to many people who had such requests. “You want to become a fortune teller?”

Molly shrugged. “I could use an interesting party trick.”

But what the woman, whose name he learned quickly was Lila, wanted to show him was far too complicated to be a trick. It was six tricks stacked on top of each other and hidden inside a seventh. The actual meaning of the cards was nothing; what was important was reading the one asking for the fortune, deducing what they wanted to hear and making sure the cards laid down could be twisted into something suitable. Molly was so entranced he ended up spending hours with Lila, watching her artfully shuffle. 

“It’s a show, dear,” Lila said as the cards flew from hand to hand. She was remarkably agile, considering her outward appearance. “People don’t care about knowing their future, they care about getting their money’s worth.”

“Makes sense.” Molly knew the worth of coin intimately; he could understand that. By the time he gave his goodbyes to Lila, he knew the worth of the cards as well.

He practiced in his room at the inn, even through his usual night’s reading time, to try and make the cards fly like he’d seen Lila do. He managed a passable imitation, but it wasn’t satisfying after what he’d seen. Molly only put the cards aside when he was yawning too much and causing his eyes to tear up, clouding his vision. 

Since he  _ had  _ paid for the room through the week, Molly intended to use it as much as possible, mostly by sleeping in; however, the world had other plans, and he was roused the next morning much earlier than he wanted by a pounding on the door. 

On the other side was Yasha and a scowling half-orc.

Molly blinked, his tired brain working to process the pair and guess their intent towards him. “I’m pretty sure the statute of limitations has expired on whatever you’re trying to get me for,” he said. 

The half-orc (what had his name been?) scowled even more. “We’re not here about that,” he spat out. “Did you talk to Lila yesterday?”

“No.”

Yasha rolled her eyes. The half-orc looked unimpressed. “Quite literally everyone saw you with her.”

“That could have been anyone,” Molly said halfheartedly. 

“Yes, I’ve heard there’s an abundance of purple tieflings in this are,” Yasha said flatly. 

“What’s this ‘Lila’ got to do with me, anyway?” Molly made an effort to change the subject. 

“Funny thing is,” the half-orc said, “we come to this town every year because this is the part of winter when we’re stuck in one place, and Lila’s got a daughter or something here who she likes to visit. We wake up this morning and Lila’s gone over to the daughter’s, and she says she’s retiring and won’t work for us anymore. Do you know what a carnival is like without a fortune-teller? Shit.”

“Still don’t know what this has to do with me,” Molly said.

“She says she’s retiring because she’s found a successor,” Yasha said. “More bluntly, a replacement.”

Molly stared at them a little while longer before something in his sleepy brain clicked.

“Absolutely not,” he said.

“ _ You’re  _ the one who made her leave in the first place, you  _ cannot  _ refuse!” the half-orc said.

“Well, I am! No! I’m doing perfectly fine on my own!”

“We’ve got a heater you can sleep next to and we feed you,” Yasha said.  

Molly hesitated, and thought again of the prices the owner of the inn had named. “...What’s the pay like?”

“Whatever you can earn,” the half-orc said gruffly. “And we take that to pay for the food and wood for the heater.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“If you want, you can buy your own food, cook it yourself, and buy your own heater.”

“Don’t be so quick to ostracize me,” Molly retorted. “Do I have to dress up?”

“Moderately, at least.”

“...Fine.”

* * *

 

The main tent of the carnival, already set up, was warm inside and cast in a yellow glow by periodic torches set in the muddy central ring. Molly got a lot of interested looks as he was installed among the members already there.

The half-orc, Bo, was a general manager, and a man named Gustav the owner of the carnival. Yasha was a woman-of-all-work who helped with setup and kept ne’er-do-wells out. There were many performers - a fiddler, a singer, a pair of dancers, a fire-lady - who Molly was assured he would become familiar with quickly enough. For the moment, he sat curled over his cards and practiced.

It was not an easy transition. Molly didn’t earn much money at first, unfamiliar with the showmanship he was expected to suddenly master. But it was difficult to live with so many people and not eventually learn their names and warm up to them; they certainly embraced him quicker, if still with some hesitance. Even Yasha stopped holding his smartass comment against him - as far as he could tell, at least. 

And with practice, Molly got better. Eventually it transpired that some of his money had gone to his own benefit, which he learned when he was presented with an ostentatious red robe to join the ragtag collection of Lila’s scarves he’d inherited. One day he found that his old scimitar had been replaced with two, used but shining and with blue leather grips. He nearly came to blows with Bo over that (both over not being consulted and being expected to learn how to  _ juggle,  _ now) but the new scimitars  _ were  _ very nice, so the trouble didn’t last. 

The carnival was quite the show, not counting Molly - he lurked on the fringes of the crowd the first night and was reluctantly awestruck. But as he learned, it was all smoke and mirrors. It was makeup and misdirection, shiny lights in the dark evening. 

“So?” One of the halfling dancers, Mona, scoffed when Molly happened to mention this in conversation. “Should I stop doing my dance? Should I stop making people happy?”

“Your dance is meant to be  _ scary _ ,” Molly said.

“People like to be scared,” the other halfling, Eulie, replied. “They like it when they can be scared while they’re safe and warm in a fancy tent during a rare night out. Then they can talk and laugh about it when they leave with their family to go back home.” 

Molly couldn’t really argue with that, but he made a good effort at it before they kicked him out so they could do their makeup in privacy. 

Still, Molly didn’t get why everyone in the carnival seemed to buy so thoroughly into the smoke and mirrors of their acts when they had a hand in putting together the shortcuts and flashy effects. He assumed - well, it would be unkind to repeat some of the things he assumed. But he was content to continue his own little act when it got him food and a warm bed for the winter, and so he learned to be flashier and flashier with his cards, and pull the right ones to spin convincing fortunes for the peasants who came to watch.

One night, in the third town the carnival had come to that winter, a man tried to pay for his fortune with a sheaf of papers tied together.

“It costs money, my friend,” Molly said, not bothering to so much as extend a hand. “Not paper, no matter what the empire’s trying to print these days.”

“It’s not paper money,” the peasant man said. “Please, I don’t want it, but I promise it’s worth something.”

Molly deigned to look the papers over. There was spidery writing on them, but he couldn’t read what fragments were visible. “So you say.”

The man fumbled for a moment, then threw a silver piece on top of the papers, causing Molly’s eyes to widen. “Please. I just want it out of the house.”

Molly whisked the papers and the silver piece away. “My good man, I’ll give you two fortunes if you like.”

He did; and when the man was gone, Molly closed up shop and went to read in his corner of the bunk tent.

The papers had been torn out of a book; the left edge of each was frayed and ragged. The spidery writing spelled out, on the first page, a recipe. Molly’s eyebrows rose higher with each successive ingredient.

The other side of the page described what it was.

The Hunter’s Bane, Molly read with increasing fascination, was a poisonous alchemical concoction  _ meant  _ to be imbibed. It altered the makeup of the drinker’s blood, granting them strange magical powers if only a small cut was made when necessary. The other pages described strange magics that would bind one thoroughly to the darker side of nature, allowing understanding and near-kinship with such powers. 

Molly quickly hid them in the one book he still owned when the fire-lady, Morgause, came back for her jacket. His heart was pounding, but he hoped it didn’t show. He pretended he’d been reading the book, and that he didn’t care about her presence.

Wasn’t this what he’d been looking for? He’d left all those years ago, and he’d been distracted for a long time while he journeyed, but this was everything he’d ever wanted in a neat bundle. This would bring him closer to whatever ancestry had given him his horns and clawlike nails and tail - and maybe he could find it, then, and get some answers. He could learn magic to dazzle and impress. 

He’d heard stories of bloodhunters, of  _ course,  _ but those were just fairy stories. Warning parables where the hunter became the hunted, to warn about the futility of revenge, et cetera. Molly doubted they were true. And in any case, if he kept his money - he would buy his own food and sleep separately, and then with what he could keep saved he could buy some of these ingredients in the town. He might need supplies like glass phials and a small flame - Molly flipped back to the papers as soon as Morgause left and feverishly scanned over the recipe instructions. No flame except at the end. That was good.

He needed to plan.

* * *

 

Bo, as the go-between for most of the carnival workers and the bosses, wasn’t happy about Molly’s plan, but only said “It’s your funeral, kid,” when Molly promised it wouldn’t be for long. Morgause, who was also the camp doctor, looked sideways at him when Molly asked for a few of her phials, but lent him some when he cracked a joke about experimenting. 

He went hungry for a couple weeks. It wasn’t fun, but some of the ingredients of the Bane were expensive, and his fortunes were only two copper each. If he started charging more, he’d just lose customers. 

Some of the instructions were complicated. Ingredients had to be mixed in specific ways, left to sit for a week with snow packed around it to chill it, then the next piece added at precisely midnight by the light of a small flame (which was not allowed to touch the cold mixture). He had to gather certain herbs himself under the light of the full moon. 

His coworkers probably noticed something was up with him - Molly wasn’t stupid. But they didn’t know  _ precisely  _ what he was doing, and that was what got him to the point of standing out in the woods by himself, holding a poisonous blue mixture that occasionally fizzed, elated to the point of barely breathing.

“So what is it?” Yasha’s voice startled him badly enough that the Bane almost spilled. A couple drops splashed onto Molly’s hands, making him hiss in pain. He turned around, seeing that Yasha had come up quietly and was watching him from behind a tree.

“What are you doing here?” Molly demanded. 

“Why are you hiding in the woods with a secret potion?” Yasha replied. 

“It’s not a potion.”

“Then what is it?”

Molly glared, then pointedly turned away from her. “I came out here because I wanted privacy, you know.”

“I figured.” 

Yasha’s arrival had thrown everything out of whack. The sense of triumph that had possessed Molly moments ago was gone. “Can you please leave?”

“Why, so you can poison yourself with a badly-made potion?”

“It’s not badly made,” Molly said stiffly, alarmed by how close to the mark she had hit. 

“Then drink it.”

Molly raised the phial. He stared at the bright blue liquid, wondering how it would taste. If he would feel what it would do to him.

“Why are you afraid?” Yasha asked.

“I’m not!” Molly yelped, turning to glare at her again. “It’s just a lot.”

“Looks like about an ounce.”

“That’s not-” Molly gave up the sentence before going any farther, rolling his eyes. “It  _ does  _ a lot, once I drink it. It’s very magical.”

“Doesn’t sound safe.”

“Well, it’s not your decision.” Molly squared his shoulders and raised the phial again. 

“You still look afraid.”

“Would you stop saying that!”

“ _ Are  _ you?”

“No,” Molly said, wishing he’d said it more decisively. “You don’t understand. This will make everything make  _ sense.  _ I’ve had so many questions my whole life and finally I’m getting  _ answers. _ ”

“You’re not making sense.” Yasha was regarding him almost warily. Her hand was half raised, like it was straying towards the hilt of her sword. 

“Well, that’s on you,” Molly said, and before he could lose his nerve downed the Bane like a shot.

Yasha’s lunge managed to knock Molly to his knees and the empty phial out of his hand. Molly toppled onto his side in the next moment, gasping from the force of the burn sliding down his throat. It wasn’t anything like alcohol. It  _ hurt.  _ He felt like his insides were being eaten away. He couldn’t do anything but lie in the half-melted snow and gag.

A large hand fastened around his arm and hauled him up. Molly was thrown over a shoulder which his hazy mind identified only because he could feel the layer of furs Yasha wore around her shoulders. Then a shoulder jabbed into his stomach, and he was too busy trying not to throw up to worry about anything to do with Yasha.

The trees swayed sickeningly, the lines of the bark twisting into jeering faces with jagged mouths. Spots buzzed in the corners of his vision. Molly dug his nails into the sides of the thing he was slumped over, trying to stop it from jostling. 

He saw terrible things, things he couldn’t be sure were real or not real.There were jabbering, devilish-looking figures which pressed in close and resisted all his attempts to push them away. Stars wheeled wildly overhead and were swallowed by sharp-toothed shadows which were rooted in the flickering torches of the carnival camp. Then the searing pain of what felt like the blood in his veins being burned away overtook Molly, and he remembered little else. 

* * *

 

Molly learned later that Yasha had brought him back to camp as quickly as she could. The Bane had almost instantly gotten into his system, making him see things and sapping his strength. He’d clawed bloody lines into Yasha’s arm without realizing it. Morgause, deputizing others to search his things, had discovered the remains of the ingredients for the Bane as well as the recipe, and realized how deeply poisonous the mixture was. All her skill and best efforts, however, had not purged it from him.

Molly had been feverish and unconscious for nearly a full twenty-four hours; there had been a few moments of lucidity which he did not remember where apparently he’d refused to explain his reasoning but said he was sorry everyone overreacted and got so worried. 

“You’ll be lucky if you don’t get fired,” Morgause said, while a still-feverish and ill Molly watched her pack up her tools of the trade from where he was huddled under a blanket. “And see if  _ I  _ ever lend you anything again, you utter fool.”

Molly was very aware that most of the carnival was under the impression he’d tried to kill himself, or do something similarly stupid. The papers with the recipe for the Bane had been burned - Morgause, seeing his horror and anger, refused to tell him who’d done it. Molly got a lot of strange, pitying looks, but not many efforts at conversation or to include him in camp activities other than regular work.

He was not fired. But he was supervised directly by Bo, and definitely not allowed to keep a hold of the money he earned anymore, and though his illness persisted through the next week he had no choice but to work it into his act.

At least the Bane papers had warned of the dangers of becoming an outcast. 

Molly saw nothing of Yasha during the week or so he spent recovering. She was still  _ there,  _ just conspicuously absent every time Molly happened to glance around and look for her. He hadn’t realized how closely he’d become attached to her as ‘the one he liked to talk to’ until he no longer could. 

Winter bled slowly into spring; the carnival moved on. Molly could feel himself slipping deeper and deeper into isolation. His new powers did nothing to help him talk to his coworkers. The ease with which he could spot monsters and things lurking in the shadows (which were rarely there to spot) couldn’t help him tell better fortunes. He felt as though he barely had the energy for showmanship.

The glitz and the glamour of the job had not changed; he had. And he couldn’t go on like that forever.

It was in Morgause’s tent once again that Molly found himself, this time not ill but shirtless and wincing as she applied the needle to his skin. Morgause herself had no tattoos, making herself somewhat remarkable among the carnival workers; but of course it would be difficult to apply any to herself in easily visible places. 

“You’d better stop moving your face by the time I start doing the cheek part,” Morgause commented, “or else you’re going to get a wonky peacock.”

“I’ll do my best,” Molly replied through gritted teeth. 

Behind him, the tent flap swished. Morgause finished her needle-prick, then looked up. “Oh, give me a minute. I’m busy”

The newcomer did not reply; perhaps they nodded. They were out of Molly’s sight. He forgot all thoughts of looking as Morgause grabbed his chin and began working her art on the sensitive area just underneath his jaw, and he had to focus all his will on staying still instead of flinching.

The newcomer must have been patient, because Morgause continued her work until the whole right side of Molly’s face and neck was stinging where the body of the peacock had been inked. He would have to come back to have the feathers done later; for now, he grinned at Morgause despite the pain and handed the mirror back.

“I really fit in now,” he said. The indigo ink was easy to see on his pale skin, and he thought it was quite a nice color. The peacock was peeking over the curve of his ear, hidden by his horns from certain angles. Technically, it could be considered subtle. 

“Get some better makeup first,” Morgause shot back, but it was a friendly riposte. Molly laughed under his breath as Morgause retreated to clean her equipment. 

“A peacock,” the newcomer said quietly, and Molly startled and jerked around. He regretted it when his newly-tattooed skin was twisted far too far and stung viciously. 

Yasha watched him dispassionately as Molly swore, turning his head back the other way and pressing a hand over the reddened skin. “What are you doing here?” He demanded.

“Bo wants to talk to Morgause,” Yasha said. 

It was Morgause’s turn to swear. “You couldn’t have said something earlier?” She snatched up her coat and practically sprinted out, leaving Yasha and Molly alone.

“Aren’t you going to compliment my new tattoo?” Molly asked as Yasha turned to leave. She paused in the entrance, but did not turn around. “I think it’s pretty good.”

“It’s very you,” Yasha said. 

“I might get more.”

“The purple suits you better than the ink.”

Surprisingly touched, Molly didn’t protest as Yasha swept out. It was more than he’d heard from her in a while.

Maybe he  _ would  _ get more tattoos, just because of her.

* * *

 

When they stopped in their next destination, Molly wandered up next to Yasha. “Would you like to guard me while I go convince people to spend their coin here?”

“If I don’t, you’ll probably be snapped in half when you run your mouth off at the wrong person,” Yasha replied without looking at him.

“You can be the charm, then,” Molly said. “I need a hype man. Could you do that?”

“I’m very good at hype,” Yasha said. “Hey, look at this guy. Here come the magic cards.”

“We’ll work on it.” 


End file.
